I loved Shogun and I’d like to know which of his Asian Saga books I should read.
What say you?
I enjoyed all of them except Gai-Jin.
I liked King Rat, which is set in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.
I remember enjoying all of the ones I read…
Seconding King Rat and Tai Pan.
I haven’t read these in ages, but I remember enjoying both a great deal.
All of them except Gai-Jin, which was the last one he wrote and fleshes out a part of his connected narrative that really didn’t need any fleshing out.
Noble House was probably my favorite after Shogun.
That’s about right. I never read Whirlwind, but overall, that seems right. Noble House isn’t all that great, although it would have been at about half the length.
Noble House is still good though. Tai Pan is better, I think almost as good as Shogun (although I haven’t felt the need to reread it, unlike Shogun). I never made it past 2/3 of Gai-Jin, and never more than 50 pages through Whirlwind.
I’ve read the complete series and Tai-Pan and Noble House are the two that I would recommend. Tai-Pan centers on Scottish pirates and Noble House has a cool 60’s Mad Men vibe.
I started with Shogun also, and was surprised to find I enjoyed those set in Hong Kong even more. Also, Clavell turned out to be a bit of a prognosticator since a lot of the political intrigue he invented for Noble House came out in the news to be true 20 years later.
King Rat is only loosely connected and doesn’t have the scope of the rest of the saga, but is a short, easy read. It really has a completely different feel and is only considered part of the saga for the inclusion of some tertiary characters in the later novels.
Also, after reading them I found out Clavell wrote “The Fly” and co-wrote “The Great Escape” and my mind was blown.
King Rat it is a great read, Tai Pan and Noble house are both also good. Never finished Gai Jin and didn’t start Shogun so can’t comment
I also highly recommend the TV Mini-series of Shogun from around 1980.
IIRC it’s about 9 or 10 hours long. Do not confuse it with the theatrical release which cuts the series down to 2.5 hours.
Total guilty pleasure. Watching Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune chew scenery was really a lot of fun. One of the funniest things I found about it, was that the acting was good enough on the Japanese side that I didn’t need the subtitles to figure out what was going on. Really hard to believe that network t.v. used to put out dramatic works of such length, scope, and quality. Oh well, that’s what we have HBO for now, I guess.
Another vote for King Rat, and I guess I need to go find a copy of Noble House and Tai-Pan.